Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Martin Kobe’s first exhibition Perisphere in London since his solo exhibitions with White Cube in 2005 and 2007. Kobe will present new work made especially for Perisphere, running from 2 May to 1 June, to include the largest scale work he has made for six years.
Kobe creates vibrant architectural paintings that bring us visions of an impossible world: highly detailed representations of imaginary spaces that dissolve into painterly abstraction. There is a unique self-reflexive property that emerges from Kobe’s fictions of drawn and painted space, where the relationship between two and three dimensions is corrupted and merges into one.
As well as activating a kind of philosophical proposition, Kobe’s paintings invite a highly perceptual experience. They emit an optical resonance that is shaped by the creative dialectic between colour and light. Colour is at once the structuring principle for the content and the aspect that floats in its own space on the canvas.
Kobe came to the fore as part of Life After Death, New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Collection, which toured 2005 to 2008 from the Rubell Collection, Miami to Mass MoCA; SITE Sante Fe, New Mexico; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Salt Lake Art Center, Utah; and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. In addition to those at White Cube, Kobe has presented solo exhibitions at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Kunstverein Leipzig; Museum DA2, Salamanca, and Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin. He has also recently shown at Seongnam Arts Center, South Korea; Neue Galerie Gladbeck; Kunsthalle, Erfurt; Kunsthalle Münster; SAFN Reykjavik; Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen; and Galerie der Künstler, Munich.
Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 10-6, Sat 10-4.
For further information, please contact Claire Nichols on gallery@houldsworth.co.uk or +44 (0)20 7734 7760.
